SEO expert, Gab Goldenberg, continues his interview with About.com Web Logs and offers a variety of search engine optimization tips for bloggers at the advanced level of SEO. You can read more about Gab at the end of this article.
Follow the links to read the Beginner SEO Tips and the Intermediate SEO Tips interviews with SEO Expert, Gab Goldenberg.
What is "owning" an idea and how can bloggers own an idea?
Owning an idea is a situation where your name is associated with a given idea. When people reference the idea, they'll often link to one of your posts on the topic. Of course, all this assumes that you have the right distribution for your ideas to spread and be talked about, something I also wrote about for SEOmoz in a related manner with the post "Email Marketing for Linkbait: It's the Distribution, Stupid!".
And that's how you gain ownership of an idea - by writing about it and developing the topic and expanding on tangents, etc. The more you're associated with it, the more likely you are to get referenced in association with it. Being able to measure your social networks, obviously matters a lot to knowing how far your ideas can spread; having a friend like you tells me that I can reach readers of About.com and thus potentially gain links from them for ideas I own.
Of course, on that particular idea I'd be an oaf not to mention this post by Lee Dodd, where he shared the same distribution idea, albeit with some different tactics, way ahead of me. So that's an idea whose ownership I think we might be sharing, if I can get Lee to agree to that.
What is Universal Search and how can bloggers use Universal Search for multiple listings?
Universal Search is something that search engines have been implementing for several months now, and it's the blending of non-traditional items into search. The most prevalent right now seem to be video results (especially from Youtube, for those of you interested in Search Engine Reputation Management) and maps results.
Depending on the query, Google Base products (i.e., for ecommerce queries) also show up, and we're seeing Google News a fair bit too.
Search isn't just about the ten blue links anymore, and it's increasingly becoming a question of how many places on the page can you occupy using results from other mediums that the search engines blend into the results. Whereas a lot of this used to be seen/done mostly by reputation management pros, it's increasingly happening for competitive commercial queries too.
For bloggers, the best ways into Universal Search are getting into Google News as well as ranking for local results. You might take BrandCurve or Marketing Blurb and submit them as businesses to the search engines' local listings areas. Then, to get ranked, I suggest you see this local search engine ranking factors survey compiled by David Mihm, featuring the opinions and experience of himself, another 18 local SEO experts and yours truly.
Notice also that David put in the work to organize that, come up with questions, contact and assemble the answers of 19 other pros besides himself, and then design a nice layout for it. He definitely has a large ownership stake in the 'local SEO ranking factors' topic now.
For those also hawking products through their blogs, Google Base might be an interesting avenue to pursue, though I personally don't know as much as I should, unfortunately.
Can you give any recommendations for how bloggers can experiment with SEO?
Absolutely. Set up a variety of blogs on Blogger, and monetize them really aggressively. Adsense and affiliate ads with obvious tracking codes should fill the page. You'll see that Google probably asks you to enter a captcha for every new post you want to create. They've tied aggressive monetization to spammers, and are using that to help filter out splogs (spam blogs). You can then take that idea and avoid monetizing with ads/affililiate ads until you've really built up a big audience; your site will take longer to get trusted otherwise.
Generally, to experiment, what you want to do is create dummy sites on nonsense keywods (like agrleowibm) and have them be identical in all but one respect. Then see how the search engines react and you know how they treat that factor.
What is footprinting and blog security?
Footprinting is the practice of figuring out the visible traits of similar websites. By similar websites, I mean those that have the same CMS usually, though crackers (malicious hackers) will footprint security loopholes not-CMS dependant. A well known footprint is "Powered by Wordpress" - search for that in Google and you get a bunch of wordpress blogs. Spammers do that to find blogs to spam links on.
The relation this has to blog security is that a lot of CMS updates are done to void security loopholes. Wordpress 2.3 is more secure than Wordpress 2.2, 2.5 is better than 2.3 and so on. If your site gets footprinted as being on an older version with known security problems, crackers can attack it and inject links, etc. How do you think college websites and social media sites rank for "Buy Viagra"? They got cracked, and spammers added pages and links to them.
For the person getting their site broken into though, rankings will typically suffer. I like to refer people to my friend Hamlet Batista's posts on the relation between the two: SEO and Internet Security and protect yourself from a DDOS attack. (Again, note how he owns the topic in my mind).
I also need to give credit where it's due - my friend XMCP introduced me to footprinting with his post A 10 Minute Trick to Cut Blog Spam (by Eliminating Footprints).
